Lujayn Infoways-A professional Web Design and Development Company at Ahmadabad; born with an aim of providing web design and web development services with quality, transparency and price tag that you never found with others.

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Previously in part
1 and par
2, we have analyzed acute fragmentation issues on Android OS and in part
3, we tried to get ideas of some concurrent solution existing in the
present market. Now, in this recent post I would like to cite some third-party
tools, which are capable to change the entire game of Android development and
ease the pains of developers at greater extent.

Third-Party Android Tools – Game Changer

With the pace of time, Android being an open and malleable
platform, have established a rich ecosystem of 3rd party developers
and accumulate treasure of various tools. These vast contributions have
gradually changed the ways of how Android application designers, Android
application programmers, and Android application testers work and accomplish
their challenges with desired success. Let’s check which tools, frameworks,
technologies, and services have left or leaving great impacts on the Android
app developer community by-and-large.

Emulator – Genymotion

No doubt, Android SDK carries out-of-box emulators, but
Genymotion is faster than those in-built tools so it is getting momentum among
the Android community.

Hybrid Extensions and
Plug-ins

If you opt for robust functionality, out-of-box features,
and excellent user experiences accumulation of various plug-ins are essential such
as social sharing plug-ins, cloud integration, email composers, native page
transitions, and many AWS like web services.

Chromium WebView

Web components are essential part of mobile app development
and for Android platform Google has introduced Chrome V8 JavaScript engine with
the release of android KitKat updates. These web components are available for
developers in form of WebView. Thus, taking help through WebView may offer
modern web standard support to the Android developers in their app development.

HTML Application
Runtime – Crosswalk

We know WebView now and its ultimate benefits for obtaining
web services in Android applications. However, by nature web components need
constant updates and providing them runtime engine is essential to avoid manual
updates of WebView frequently. Crosswalk is giving HTML based application
runtime services.

Thus, Android developers can leverage the emerging web and
mobile technologies such as:

Therefore, the portable Crosswalk runtime engine for HTML,
CSS, and JavaScript based applications eliminates constant updates of Android WebView
and ease the life of programmers at greater extent.

Android Studio

Google has freed Android developers form Eclipse and ADT
plug-in combo by unveiling Android Studio. In Android Studio, you will find
Gradle-based build system, code template to create common app features without
ditching things from the scratch, editor with Intellisense, abilities to
utilize imported classes, etc. These are something that modern Android developers
love in the latest IDE and fortunately, Android Studio pass their tests for
selection of IDE in Android app development.

In short, aforementioned tools have eased the work and life
of an average Android application developer and of entire Android developer
community by-and-large. If you opt for any advance level Android app designing
as well as Android app programming work, you need to have updated team of hire
Android application developers and an established Android development
company with the latest infrastructure as well as trained human resources like Lujayn
to win the battle.

Sunday, February 1, 2015

In the previous
part 1, we have seen some pre-launch strategies for startups for brick as
well as online adventures. Keeping the thread continue in this current part, we
will check further strategies as pre-launch.

Online pre-launch strategies:

Creating Landing Pages and Final Version of Website

Now, as the next step you can create your landing pages in the lab and you can get them on testing servers if you are creating buzz for your brick store only without unveiling full scale website

Now integrate code of search engine analytics tools like Google Analytics, Bing, etc, as per their guidelines

Finally, integrate social media tools and other plug-ins, extensions, 3rd party tools for Internet marketing

Activities Just
before Launch of Startup:

Once your website or landing page is ready and published on
the web, begin its Internet marketing by initiating following activities:

Write a compelling and informative press release regarding to your release, its date, and time of release.

Create off page content like blogs, articles, etc. and post them on good ranking as well as reputed directories or sites

Do some social bookmarking of those links with unique meta data

Spread their links and some viral messages on social media like Twitter, Facebook pages, and G+ pages.

Take part or create funny and engaging contests online and spread your ads there

Begin email marketing using modern tools like MailChimp and get feedback

Prepare robust and appealing videos of your startup and products or services and upload it on YouTube like audio visual media to get your launch viral

Release Day Strategies

Now, it is time to release your startup and unveils your
product, as a brick store or as online storefront, and begins the process of
creating your buzz by following simple marketing strategies given below.

Now start posting all aforementioned content you have prepared in pre-release step

Schedule tweets and emails so you can inform your relevant audience about your launch and engage them further

Link submission on list and directory sites to augment your content submitted on various blogs, articles, and press release directories as well as get some back links for SEO purpose

Submit links and news in media and social media to bring more traffic and lure your prospective customers through your transparency and commitments of services

Attend feedback quickly if any to satisfy the curiosity of your customers or visitors

Post-Release
Strategies

If you think once, the launch is finished. Your marketing is
over, but that may prove a big mistake in itself. Since, the post launch period
is the real buzz time and marketing time, and it may continue forever for your
business growth.

Now, you should be courteous enough and wish thanks
to everyone who contributed you

Create buzz on social media and engage visitors
more

Focus on support, maintenance, and update if
needed. These post release care may reward you for longer and will build strong
support to your branding campaigns by providing positive reviews from your
satisfied and loyal customers.

Take some help of print and other traditional
marketing methods if your budget permits

If you have good budget, you can think of mobile app release
for your online business startup because it may reward you in good deal due to
vast and affluent audience on handheld devices. Of course, you need to have
good mobile app development company at your side like Lujayn that may help you
to get good responsive
web designing services at premium rates.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

When we are designing a navigation scheme or a menu, we
should consider user interaction events besides the navigation layout,
appearance, and links. As the user journey begins with the user interactions
with the interface and navigation interface has its own kinds of events.

Intro:

In this series, we are exploring
various aspects of navigation designing for web and mobile. In the first
part of this series, we have seen how navigation symbols take parts in
successful navigation designs and in the second
part of the series, we had explored the target areas further. Now, in this
current third part, we are aiming to dig the most common interaction events in
navigation menus or schemes designing.

Generally, four kinds of
interaction events take place when the users begin interactions with UI and particularly,
on navigation menus or schemes on the web and mobile client devices. They are hovering,
clicking, scrolling, and typing. Among these, hovering may not applicable in
responsive design on mobile devices in particular. However, we will explore
some aspects of hovering interaction events in this post because still half of
our users are coming from desktops and laptops like big screen devices where
pointing devices are in action, not the touch gestures.

Hovering Interaction Event

Mouse over or hovering event is
generally used in case of text links effects, tool tips effects, popup fire-up
events, and now in pop up of navigation menu. Good web designers know that
hovering event on navigation menu may cause accidental opening of menu when
users simply traverse on different parts of the website and crossing the
navigation bars.

At user experience point of view,
it is annoying users and its has simple clue to stop such accidental opening
that is giving a delay of 0.5 seconds when curser arriving on the target area. Of
course, designers should take care once the 0.5 seconds over, hovering event
should take place within 0.1 second otherwise, your users will get bad
impression of your website. The same is true when mouse curser go away from the
active areas of the corresponding menu button and menu itself. There should be
a delay of 0.5 second to close the menu window and it should accomplish within
next 0.1 second.

In mega websites, designers take
help of another workaround and it is to create a temporary invisible target
area in order to avoid accidental appearing or disappearing of popup menu
during traveling to the intended links on window/menu from the main navigation
button.

Tooltips

With hovering interaction, event
tooltips appear as navigation menu for categories and sub-categories items. This
trend is gaining ground due to some obvious benefits of tooltips in UX. However,
using tooltips on hovering is not entirely problem free and it might have
following issues at UX and Usability point of views.

It is difficult to know that whether tooltips
exist or not

It is possible for tooltips to obstruct the next
items in navigation

There are possibilities of delay problems if
they are too short or too long

Comparison between items become difficult in
tooltip hovering interaction event

Tooltips are useless in responsive design when
mobile devices are client-devices

Conclusion

Based on the above-described pros
and cons of hovering interaction event in navigation design, the team of UX
experts and web
designers at Lujayn, for responsive as well as static website
design, take steps carefully and add hovering events in navigation only in
selected cases.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Responsive websites or mobile apps have different use
contexts compared to desktop only versions. Therefore, their testing is always
a challenging task. Generally, we take two routes to test, one by general and
large scale testing or by broad assumptions while another is the designing of a
feature and testing it in its specific ways. In fact, they both are two extreme
ends of the testing spectrum, but participatory design of testing can bridge
them and offer contextual usability tests.

Introduction:

As we are living
in mobile era and almost 50% population use mobile devices to access the web
for all purposes including critical shopping. As, the day before yesterday, we
were developing websites for desktop users and have used our testing system
accordingly. Therefore, we have tough time to offer excellent user experiences
and usability on mobile devices in responsive web designing endeavors.

Today we have many
advance and appropriate testing systems, methods, and facilities to accomplish
our quality maintenance tasks for intricate responsive website development
project. For instance, we can run guerilla UX test with the least investment of
time and money. Same the way for usability testing, we have participatory
design to test our contextual interactions in real-time.

Why We Need Contextual Participatory Test

Yes, contextual
testing matters more for the mobile website and application testing. As, we
know mobile used in wider and in unexpected use cases and contexts due to its
mobility factors against the standalone desktops or laptops with partial
mobility. For instance, when a mobile user accesses a website during its
commuting route, she has altogether different needs and issues with the website
from the other locations like office or home.

If we think on
getting out in the field for UX or usability testing with real users in
real-time, it becomes impossible to accomplish our project within given
timelines. Therefore, we have to simulate much of our contextual experiences in
the lab or in the areas of our vicinity in economic and safe ways. In due
course, industry has one refined approach for mobile testing and that is
participatory design. As, this test takes short time and limited users, as the participants,
we can go cost-effective ways without missing much quality credentials.

Steps of Participatory Design Test Session

Step 1 - Intimate Users Regarding Test

At first step, we
used to introduce our app and testing points that uncover the actual usage of
our app or website or anything creating pains in user experiences. If you successfully
brought awareness and put them in right contexts that you want to use product,
you would have better cooperation from them.

In this process,
you must go in-depth and create questions, which should cover: when, where, how
long, what tasks, and how satisfied like categories.

Step 2 – Documentation

Once you soak them
in your desired contexts through initial questions, draw a timeline for the beginning
and end of the test as well as tell test participants to fill its intermediate
steps using documentation techniques. In this documentation process, you can
use colorful stickers to overlay their emotions in the range of negative and
positive. This way you will capture their happiness and frustration in qualitative
as well as quantitative measures.

Step 3 – Sketching Experiences

For this step of
test, you have to bring participants in the lab and tell them to recall their
field experiences and translate them in some wireframe like designs. Give
participant the pen-paper, drawing and cutout equipments, and tap and scissors
to stick cutouts on the design of phone and its screens or interfaces, just
like we do in prototyping.

Step 4 – Feedback

Now, in this final
step, converse with participants after examine their sketches and documents. Place
your own imaginative designs on the table or show in modern prototyping tools
with interactions and animations. Thus, they will push their boundaries and will
provide you valuable feedback on the designs. Thus, they will help you to
iterate or refine your development methodologies.

Fortunately, Lujayn
has excellent web
design and mobile development team with enough experiences in
participatory design testing to bring robust outcomes on the table.

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

At present, we are developing very intricate software
products for desktop, web, and mobile. The development process demands
involvement of a big team of designers, programmers, and others in highly
collaborative ways. Thus, creating the right environment and process for the
development are challenging for modern project managers as well as software
development company. However, payoffs for such hard efforts are highly
rewarding and astounding.

In software development companies, it is a general practice
of allocating work that they describe features and functionality needs in the
software. Unfortunately, never target the final goals of the software and never
try to inspire their development teams to think that how users will accomplish
their goals. This process involves the development teams around the common
vision.

If we want development team to work around the common
vision, we have to foster the culture of collaboration where we have to create
an environment and essential self-defending processes. In collaboration
culture, each team member would have common understanding of the software and
its goals. They have enough space to place their thoughts, opinions, and possible
solutions. There would be some discussions, arguments, and finally negotiation
or concession on a compromised solution.

Of course, these all processes will run under the
supervision of project manager or team leader who would have vision,
experiences, and expertise to lead the teams in right direction with active
involvement. In order to foster right collaboration culture, we have created
collaborative environment through physical space, virtual spaces, and running
discussion or feedback sessions.

Collaboration through
Physical Space

In process of creating collaborative environment, we need to
mix up team members according to their projects and personality or expertise so
they can easily fall in the fruitful discussions. Moreover, we have facilitated
their free movements among the other relevant teams or team members to the
project by offering open desk, standing table, couches, etc. facilities to they
can move around and work whenever needs arise.

The next trait of collaborative environment is to
encouraging the flow of ideas and we can do this by allowing them to stick
notes, design sketches, prioritization lists of work, etc. encouraging
materials on the wall or on the predefined boards. Moreover, we can offer them
whiteboards to draw charts or development paths and modify after some
discussions.

Finally, we can allow other irrelevant, but software teams
or members of staff to run some dialogues informal ways on coffee table, launch
or canteen space, etc. places so they can look at the project from entirely different
perspectives with the help of people from the outside and can run some guerilla
survey for UX and usability if needed.

Collaboration through
Virtual Space

Creating physical spaces for collaboration is somewhat
costly affairs for many software companies, but modern communication
technologies and collaboration software ease our some of the problems in cheaper
ways. For instance, we have Campfire, Slack, HitChat, etc. like collaborative
communication tools while Basecamp, Trello, Jira, etc. like tools are for
collaborative project management. Similarly, GitHub, Bitbucket, etc. are
collaborative source-code repository.

Thus, we have enough arsenals to create highly collaborative
and effective virtual spaces to work with a team or team members dispersed across
the globe and different time zones.

Fortunately, Lujayn has both kinds of collaborative spaces
where its in-house web and mobile development
teams are working in physical space and its teams of clients are working with its
in-house teams in virtual space, particularly in case of B2B clients.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Mobile debugging is hardly proving successful on desktop
tools, as simulation of mobile user experiences and its related problems are
not possible with desktop screen as well as its pointing devices. Therefore,
remote debugging with real mobile devices offers the best-fit debugging
solutions.

Remote Debugging in Mobile

Intro:

For mobile app developers, designing and programming user
experiences are challenging tasks at each stage of development. As, real UX is
only possible with real devices our attempts to simulate or emulate UX on our
desktop or laptop machines is a futile exercise.

Role of Simulators
& Emulators

However, practically testing our iOS or Android applications
on each real device is not a feasible option at all because of cost,
availability of devices, and time spend on testing. Therefore, most of mobile
application developers are using in-built simulators provided in SDK of the
respective OS platform. For instance, Apple offers official simulators in its
Xcode and you can easily use them on your Mac machine. You can test iPhone and
iPad screens with their hardware version and iOS version variations.

Similarly, Android provides emulators for Android devices
through ADT tools in Eclipse and in Android SDK. You can create Android Virtual
Device (AVD) for the choice of your real Android device to test and can beat
the huge fragmentation related issues on the Android platform. For rest of
other mobile platforms, you have to rely on their official simulators or
emulators such as BlackBerry Simulators, Windows Phone Emulators, Opera Mini
Emulators, etc.

Unfortunately, these desktop based simulators and emulators
are only providing limited help in debugging the mobile issues, as they never
allow us to physically tap or touch the screen with our big or small fingers or
thumbs. They never allow us to rotate or flip the devices to see accelerometer
effects in real life. These are some real problems for real UX, which can only be
addressed through real mobile devices.

Role of Remote
Testing

It is true that Apple is releasing new set of iOS devices
each year along with new version of iOS. At other hand, Android is infamous for
its hardware and software fragmentation due to myriad of device manufacturers
and backward version of Android OS in use in the market. Thus, one thing is
obvious neither any individual developer nor any company can afford to buy such
heap of devices with big budget. In due course, remote testing labs are
offering remote testing services at affordable rates, which are either a
community with a pool of devices or through a pool of some manufacturing
companies.

For instance, Samsung’s Remote Test Lab enables you to test
variety of Samsung devices using web-based interface to interact with real
physical devices and get feedback through remote monitoring software or screen
cast sent back to your machine. Keynote Mobile Testing and Open Device Lab are
other options to use for remote testing.

Remote Debugging

If you do not want to use remote testing lab option, for
many minor and real-time issues are arising frequently, during your course of
mobile app development, you have another option to connect your real mobile
devices with your development machines using USB like cable connector or
Bluetooth like wireless connection. Thus, you will inspect your source code
in-action on the real mobile device on your development machine and correct
them immediately.

For iOS devices, Apple has introduced Web Inspector tool in
Safari for devices that corresponds with desktop Safari browser and let you
perform your debugging tasks easily and in cheap ways. There are wide ranges of
developer tools in Web Inspector of Safari that enable you to tap even DOM
elements on your mobile devices and access DOM information on your desktop.

Similarly, for Android Google has introduced powerful Chrome
Developer Tools in its Chrome browsers of mobile as well as desktops. Thus, you
can leverage tons of debugging tools like DOM inspector, Network panel for
external resources, Source panel for JavaScript inspection as well as to set
breakpoints, and JavaScript console for entire set of JavaScript related
debugging.

Unfortunately, not all mobile application developers are
accustomed with such remote debugging tools for real world mobile user
experiences issues. Thus, they can’t address excellent user experiences in
their mobile app development projects. Fortunately, Lujayn has updated team of mobile
developers who can address your UX related issues beautifully with
cost-effective ways.

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

In the last 5th
part of this series, we have seen interaction designing for UX in
the UX designing CUBI model. Before it, we have seen the role of content in the
UX in second
part, while in third
part, we have seen how to integrate user goals in the UX design and
about business goals in the fourth
part. Now, keeping our journey continue in the exploration of CUBI
model for UX designers, we will analyze which factors are influencing the user
experiences on web and mobile software products and across the diverse screens.

Today usability is prime area where we focus the most, but
user experiences are something more than that and rewarding better than mere
usability of the product. Thus, apart from the above described layers in the
CUBI model, we have to understand and learn about the some important factors
that highly influencing the UX designing process while we use CUBI model. Let’s
check this user experience factors under the umbrella of CUBI model.

Branding Experience
in UX Design

Our general perception of brand is many times limiting up to
logo, color theme, and some designing elements. However, in UX designing,
branding is not up to visual identity, but extending up to tonality and totality
of the brand experiences at every touch point for users. Therefore, it is
drawing quite broad picture of branding in any UX design hence it is the most
challenging factor for the UX designers where they have to extend their reach
at all business processes, business components, communication, transactions,
production, and final outcomes of the business.

Comprehensiveness
Experience in UX Design

Comprehensive means understanding, clarity, unclutteredness,
and organization. If your product design is following the above traits in the
design, you can say that you are giving comprehensive experiences to your
end-users in the products/software. In due course, you have to make your design
scannable, categorized, labeled, and with lack of any ambiguity at all. Thus,
it is imperative to avoid excessive corporate lingo, jargon, slang, or
unreadable messages at all steps and touch point of the design and organization
experiences.

Usefulness Experience
in UX Design

If your client organization or its end-users don’t feel any
usefulness of your product then you are wasting your time and client’s money
both. Therefore, your UX design should address target audience, their needs,
and empower them to be productive to achieve their intended user goals and
business goals efficiently. If your product is useful or your design proves its
usefulness then you will see some tangible changes in their behaviors, actions
taking on the product, and their overall performance.

Usability Experience
in UX Design

Usability experiences in UX design are:

Easy to use product design experiences

Intuitive design experiences

Findable design experiences

Learnable design experiences

Legible design experiences

Consistent design experiences

Communicative design experiences

Progressive design experiences

Accessibility design experiences

Functionality design experiences

Corrective design experiences

It is true that very few people can understand such UX
designing paradigm in the industry and fortunately, Lujayn has top-notched UX
designer in its web
developmentand mobile app development teams so
you can leverage your business using their expertise and experiences at premium
price tags.

Author Bio:

Shoaib
Marfatiya is an eminent writer in web development industry and its
verticals. He has contributed a lot by throwing light on very intricate issues
of web and mobile development community.